Barbarians Within & Without

With the Mumbai murders added to the atrocities committed by Muslim terrorists during the past decade (in Bali, Lisbon, London, New York, Tel Aviv…), questions are again raised about how to eliminate terrorism “inspired” by religion.

Such barbarism is as old as religion. Even ignoring the religiously inspired barbarism of the Ancient Akkadians, Egyptians, Assyrians, and Hebrews, Christians terrorizing Jews continued for the worst part of 2,000 years, Muslims terrorizing Jews has continued for almost 1400 years, it was centuries before the terrors of the Christian Inquisition subsided, and today, Islamic terrorists continue to murder Christian, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and of course, the horrible “atheists” (or better, “scientific humanists”).

It could be stopped. It would be relatively easy to strike sufficient terror into the terrorists for them to abandon their barbarism. Unfortunately, though, the barbarians are both within and without the gates to enlightenment.

My rough estimate is that, if the people of the world (e.g., through their representatives at the UN) would permit us, then we scientific humanists could eliminate all Islamic terrorism within a decade at a cost of less than 10 million dollars per year ($10 million, not $10 billion, per year) – without using any military hardware, without destroying any property, and without any deaths. Unfortunately, however, the people are unlikely to grant their permission, especially since the clerics of the world (the herders of sheep) would rise up (for a change, united) in opposition to the means used to achieve the end of Islamic terrorism.

Theoretically, it would be easy to terrorize the Muslim terrorists, to stop their Islamic madness. Their Achilles heel is exactly the same as the source of their madness, which has continued for more than a thousand years. The source of their madness is their claim to love death.

Such madness of Muslim maniacs became apparent in the Battle of Qadisiyya in 663, when the commander of the invading Muslims sent the following message to the defending Persians:

You… should convert to Islam, and then you will be safe, for if you don’t, you should know that I have come to you with an army of men that love death, as you love life.

Similar idiocy continues today. For example, the “will” one of the Madrid bombers contains the message:

Many people take life as a path to death. I have chosen death as a path to life.

The same claim that they love death has been made by Chechen terrorists, Hezbollah leaders, and members of bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.

Humans can’t reason with such beasts, but we can terrorize them, because within the DNA of every living being is the desire to survive; those life forms that didn’t have the “programming” to seek their own survival are extinct. The minds of the terrorists have been warped by their clerics to “think” that they can live forever – even, live forever in paradise – if they’re killed as jihadis. But beneath their clerical indoctrination resides (not totally dormant) the jihadis’ fear that their indoctrination may be a lie; that their death will be their end.

To terrorize the terrorists, therefore, we need to hit their Achilles heels with arrows of truth. Thus, to get the Muslim terrorists to smarten up, we should (with a ~$10 million per year campaign) flood the air and airwaves of Islamic countries with "slogans of truth", such as the following, with the content of each message and the total number of messages sufficient so that at least one arrow will hit each target.

• There are no gods and there never were.

• More certain than the knowledge that we exist is the knowledge that no god exists or has ever existed.

• Smarten up, people: God is just make believe.

• Like all gods, Allah is a figment of overactive imaginations.

• Your religious leaders are just using you, to benefit themselves.

• If you think that you’ll live forever, then you’ve been duped by religious con artists.

• Your parents told you that Allah exists, but they, too, were duped by their parents and by religious con artists.

• Come on, people, get real: all the talk about God or Allah is just that – just talk. In reality, there are no gods and there never were.

• All religions are just make believe.

• When you die, you’re dead – and that’s the end of you.

• In logic, believing that something is true because the belief brings pleasure is called “The Proof by Pleasure Fallacy”; in religion, the same fallacy is called ‘faith’.

• Don’t “believe” anything; instead, evaluate the evidence and then estimate the probability that it’s true. There is zero evidence that any god exists or has ever existed.

• Believe in yourself! Have faith in the scientific method! People who do so are called “scientific humanists”; people who don’t should be called not “theists” but “unscientific antihumans”.

• The universe seems to have created itself via a symmetry-breaking fluctuation in a total void, leading to the Big Bang and the eventual production of stars, planets, and an autocatalytic, self-replicating molecule, from which humans eventually evolved.

• Think about it: “Religion is considered by fools as true, by scientists as false, by leaders as useful, and by clerics as a meal ticket.”

• Think about it: “Religion is the science of children; science is the religion of adults.”

And so on, sufficient to purge the stupid ideas of god and eternal life from every indoctrinated mind.

But most unfortunately, almost certainly the campaign won’t be conducted, because there are barbarians both within and without the gates to enlightenment. In the US, for example, not only would the military-industrial complex resist the plan (because of the loss of contracts to build more tanks and planes and ships) but also, members of Congress wouldn’t approve of a campaign against God; they’d consider it (rightly so) as political suicide. Further, imagine the reaction of clerics throughout the world to any campaign that would discredit their con games. And of course the majority of people throughout the world wouldn’t approve of such a campaign: half of them obviously have below-average intelligence and more than half would be unwilling to give up their crazy, egotistical hope that they’ll live forever.

So, given that there are barbarians both within and without, what are scientific humanists to do? Sorry to leave the reader with some “downers”, but I don’t see any other realistic alternatives:

• Continue to kill Muslim terrorists (although it’s essentially hopeless, since they’ll just keep on popping up like weeds).

• Terminate Muslim immigration to the West (although it will have limited effect, since those already here are breeding like rabbits and the Islamic terrorists have demonstrated that they can penetrate national boundaries).

• Evict from Western countries not only Muslims who preach or practice hate but also those Muslims who fail to demonstrate allegiance, first, to their adopted countries.

• Financially and in other ways, assist those brave Muslims in Islamic countries who are trying to enlighten people in their own countries.

• Continue with campaigns to eliminate religions in Western countries – for example, support all programs that ridicule organized religions.

• Do whatever you can to stop the funding of Islamic terrorists via Arab petro-dollars – for example, support programs to develop automobiles that run on other than gasoline and support programs to increase electric power generation from nuclear and other, non-Arab fuels.

• To alert Muslim leaders to become aware of potential consequences of terrorist attacks using weapons of mass destruction, promote a campaign to have the US Congress: 1) withdraw from the portion of the Geneva Convention dealing with destroying “objects of cultural heritage” and 2) instruct the President to request (in the event of another major terrorist attack on the US) Congressional approval to obliterate Mecca.

And another action that individual scientific humanists might want to try, although I admit that, personally, I’ve found it to be frustrating: sign up at any of many internet “religious forums”, both Christian and Islamic (which can be easily found using an internet search engine), and then, when it’s appropriate, add derisive comments about the silly idea of god. You’ll get the expected responses, but when a pebble is thrown into the pond, the ripples expand, and who knows whom you might be able to stimulate to start thinking for themselves.

www.zenofzero.net